Saturday, October 5, 2013

Breakfast links time! All the freshest of our fav links of the week, leading you to other web sites, images, blogs, and articles, and all gathered from around the Twitterverse.
• Beyond the Jersey Shore: 1920s snapshots from a chorus girl's scrapbook.
• Early 19th c. recipe for portable soup, the Regency equivalent of the modern-day stock cube.
• Vintage image: men's smoking room in a Chicago theater, 1907; each top-hatted gentleman has his own enormous ashtray.
• Solitude and Sandaya: the strange history of pianos in Burma.
• A fashionable dressing case fit for travel, 1875.
• Desperate needlework in a 19th c. asylum: the mad knitter of Dent.
• Why cats were hated in medieval Europe.
• Chaos, confusion, bewilderment! What was the appropriate dress for the outbreak of WWII?
• Grave divine consequences for pilling and drying flax or playing at "foote-ball" on the Sabbath, 1671.
• Inside America's love affair with the artist Norman Rockwell.
• This is, indeed, a good genre: medieval portraits of elephants by people who'd never seen elephants.
• Blackbeard's 18th c. pirate ship emerges piece by piece off the North Carolina coast.
• The female entrepreneur who captured New York's early 20th c. theater in photographs.
• "I'll have a glass of the 1327, please": medieval drink of mead makes a comeback.
• Julia Child's list of discarded titles for the cookbook that became Mastering the Art of French Cooking.
• A peep inside an 18th c. bachelor pad.
• The slickenstone: from Viking to Georgian times, indispensible for "ironing without an iron."
• A concise history of clotted cream.
• New exhibition contends that Edgar Allan Poe was more complex and influential than his "spooky" reputation suggests.
• Thomas McDonogh, Britain's first consul in Boston, and his red broadcloth coat.
• "By God, sir, I've lost my leg!" "By God, sir, so you have!" Artificial legs in the 19th century.
• In honor of Michaelmas on September 29: dramatic 15th c. illuminated illustration of Archangel Michael defeating Satan at the beginning of time.
• A question worth pondering (or not): did 16th c. men keep oranges in their codpieces?
• In 1846, the Catholic Church builds an orphanage on low-priced Fifth Avenue land in NYC - soon to be engulfed by millionaires' mansions.
• Marjorie Bruce, daughter of Robert the Bruce and mother of the first Stewart King of the Scots.
• America's oldest apple pie recipe (from 1796) plus other apple lore.
• The scandalous, eccentric life of William Beckford.
• From the proceedings of the Old Bailey: gin and tobacco smugglers, 1807.
• Let them dry while you read: nineteen must-have literary manicures.
• Roman skulls that were once washed down lost London river now uncovered by new construction.Hungry for more? Follow us on Twitter @2nerdyhistgirls for fresh updates daily.

I love the dressing case, since lux traveling items are always fascinating to me. And I also liked the pics from the early 20th century theater. Did you notice the pic of Dorothy Parker looked a lot like Anne Hathaway? The one after with Dorothy Castillo looking in the mirror was also fabulous and she looks like someone else...I just can't quite remember who.

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A Polite Explanation

There’s a big difference in how we use history. But we’re equally nuts about it. To us, the everyday details of life in the past are things to talk about, ponder, make fun of -- much in the way normal people talk about their favorite reality show.

We talk about who’s wearing what and who’s sleeping with whom. We try to sort out rumor or myth from fact. We thought there must be at least three other people out there who think history’s fascinating and fun, too. This blog is for them.